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r H E 



BOAT OF GH^HON, 



A POEM. 



BY 



GEORGE ALFRED TAYLOR, 






DENVER, COLORADO. 

1891. 



TH E 



BOAT OF GHi^f^Ofl, 



A ROEM. 



BY 



-: GEORGE ALFRED'fAYLOR, '^^^^'^ 






Copyright 1891, by George A. Faylor. 



DENVER, COLORADO. 
1891. 






PREFATORY, 



Ab stars at night, that march in wide 

Procession to the sage's ken 

Are scanned, and known thereafter in 

Their magnitude: somen do walk 

Upon the road of Time, into 

The Temple of Eternity, 

Thus roundly measured and thus mapp'd. 

And I, of these, my turn await. 



THE BOAT OF CHARON. 

I. 

Man is a thing that's born; and being born it follows that 

He dies. To no time heir, but to a seeming circumstance 

The fellow, he steps from waking light to sleeping shadow 

Man, living, fears the end, and at ending the future dreads, 

Or speeds his mortal pace, and, tired, at last seeks com- 
fort in 

The lodge-house of the worm. To sleep where waking 
ends, and where 

Mutable laws no more oppress; to be and to become, 

We burn the once lighted, extinguishable lamp, to surfeit 
oft. 

Death is a king, and Life, a jester, stands in cap and bells, 

Beside the eternal throne. The earth's a court for fools 
unfeed. 

And men wise past their follies, a huge brown top that 

spins round 
And casts a shadow, which doth shut the covers of man's' 

day. 
Thy playhouse, kings, and, beggars, thy prison. Folly 

was in 

The die which cast thee, world; the grave sobers thy 
revelry. 



The world's a sea, and men ships on it. Each makes a 

voyage 
And rests in port, or, wrecked midway,- sinks in the blue. 

Some coast 
By spicy isles, lay in calm streams and fill their happy sails 
To bellying with sweet winds; others, beat by freezing 

gales, 
'Mid icy hills, and shoals, and rugged reefs, hard driven, 

at last 
Drift into Arctic night, and sail no more. Some, chartless 

steer 
To brief destruction down through the narrows; some 

shave the coast 
And the wild breakers ride to fortune and discovery. 
Gold laden, some with crime's rich fruit return; dashed 

with its fruit 
Do some beat on the rocks. Here navigation errs, cur- 
rents 
Confound the card, and tides do ebb when they should 

landward flow, • 

Wherein he problems vaster than the weight of suns; and 

yet 
'Tis simply Fate, now mending childhood's broken toys, 

and now 
Sinking the scale of empire. It makes contemplation great. 

The sick man views a paradise in health ; the poor in wealth ; 
The wretch in an unrighteous gain; the rake in some 
fresh roam 



By town or main. Voluptuaries find in houri's charms 
The heaven the weary view, beyond all life's alarms. 

Alone, 
The sage philosopher, in old Contentment's bone, oft seeks 
The sweet marrow of a wise pleasure. 'Twas such a one 

I knew: 
Aged and pale haired, and mild as melting Winter when 

Spring 
Brings forth perennial flowers; wise in all wisdom, and 

more soft 
In the sweet essence of good nature, than the teat fed 

babe 
Or politician office bent; a large proletariat 
Out of times; a lay minister of a philosophy 
Untried; above the world, yet humbly conscious of the 

breadth 
Of Nature's God; ambitious to no big supernal end, 
A worm who knew his magnitude and gauged himself a 

worm. 
When morning broke, and day first gathered form, then 

he was forth 
Bathing his grateful soul in the magnetic flood of Heav'n. 
He Hved the day, and in the star and planet-freckled eve, 
He scanned the worlds that walked their treadmill orbits 

round the sun. 
In deep battallions ranged he viewed the starry army pass, 
With funereal pace, down the wide slope of night; and 

when 



The heart-fire slept, and on his guard the honest watch- 
dog sate, 
A healthful and dreamless repose drowned out his happy 

day. 
For him at dewy morn and eve, no loving wife looked out, 
No curious small family hung round his ancient knee, 
To hear his ancient tales. He deemed the bachelor 

happy, 
Escaped the pains, the pleasures and excessive ecstacies 
Of a superfluous life. Not him the soulful dove-eyed 
Senorita's song and tuned and touched guitar made gay; 
But oft for him a bowed and seamed old iifer on his reed 

blew out 
Old tunes and sober melodies, and airs that once had led 
The Southern fighters to the war, and these he simply 

deemed 
Voluptuous. In high capacious hall, he soughi no vain 
And heartless company; but, greatly humble, loved his 

dog, 
And the children and the poor, for these were next to 

nature. 

Small versed in worldly ways, he deemed the right that 

which was right — 
Man's dishonor shook his faith in man and woman's in God. 
So lived the gray old solitaire, bent on the knee of Time. 
So on the road of Hfe he passed, slow to the silent inn, 
The caravansary of sleeping citizens, and where 



The clay outlasts the mould, and brains of kings, and beg- 

gfar's hands 
Forget their ofiices, he found a perfect rest at last, 
Amid the eternal oblivion of a nameless grave. 

II. 

Now toll, ve thunders, and ye clouds, hang out your 
deepest black. 

Aii^Lher wand'ring soul embarks upon the St3^gian flood. 
Here awful night lay on the shore of earth, and, overhead, 
A starless canopy of jet roofed in the blackened world 
Old Tempest, bellowing, roared out across the Northern 
steppe. 

And there the lightning slipped its leash, and with horrific 
orb 

Scanned all the sky; then fled down to destruction 
through the East. 

Brief radiance this, and yet it seemed the curtained gloom 
was drawn 

Aside, and fabled lamps of Heav'n w^ere shone upon 
the scene. 

In the glare old Charon, ferryman on the last river, 

Stood, cowled helmsman to the dead, doomed with his 
craft to fathom 

Pluto's seas. With silent keel sw^ift passed his black- 
ribbed vessel 

Along the void, he aft. The deck, a dark, prodigious 



Sarcophagus, held man}^ a soul, and one the parting sage. 
Around large tribes of the lower creation floated out, 
And farther than on ocean reach the eves, the train 

pursued. 
Thus, with its freight, the Boat of Charon drifted to the 

sea. 
Soon was the earth left spinning on its round, and from 

the wave, 

Up rose the dead world Moon, like the face of a pure 
woman, 

And rolled down the solemn flood. Then it was left 
behind. 

Opposed the sun's irradiance, down through the under- 
world, 

Still flowed the silent stream, still rowed the silent gon- 
dolier. 

And all the dead drift of the animate world came after. 
So the migrating herds on hyperborean fields press back 
Into the North, when hungry Winter shows his icy front. 
Now was the beamy Sun lost with his rays, gone down 
behind 

The convex distance. With speeed beyond even man 

to know. 
Left as a burning star, mid solemn fields star strewn, at 

last 

The earth went o'er the gloomy horizon, and with its kind 



To disappearance passed, and all but' gloom, a speckless 
sea. 

Was lost; yet onward went the boatman and his crewless 
bark. 

Now perished heat, and thence, a vasty desert rolled, a 

plain. 

To desolation given o'er, like which men fathom not. 

Nor he, the boatman, halted ev'r, nor slacked his pon- 
d'rous flight. 

But as the comet falls, or backs, yet frictionless, he being 

In nature anomalous, swept on and swiftly onward. 

There never desert was nor void eternal, nor ever 

A voyage but had digression and an end. So with this. 

At last new skies arose, new heavens beamed on the 

boatman's ken; 

New systems, people in the solar realm and like in kind 

To small Earth's fellows, and such as intervening, Charon 

His whole route long saw rise and set in distant latitudes. 

Strewing the plains of space, now lay like monsters in a 
sea 

Of twilight. The universe fashions its communities. 

Not the sardines or gillycrew of trout that spear the wave 

Have confines more than grandest systems. These roam 
in waters, 

Within restricted room, those soar in space's airs with 
flight 



Curtailed; and as to man, to fish and to the winging birds 

Is limit giv'n, so giv'n to those tremendous animals, 
Are realms with borders absolute; and as to man's small 

mind, 
The wild'ring vacancies of space reach out into the night, 
So to the sytems, citizens and glorious peoples 
Of the world above the world, He there eternal regions 
Beyond comprehension. And to the limit of that world's 
Farthest state, inhabited of giant systems, sailing out 
A silent awful wand'rer o'er the gloom and passive stream 
Unto the wide, still ocean of this realm of whirling spheres, 
The boatman sped his bark. On to the utmost shore of it. 
Where day to twilight merged, upon the verge of star- 
less night. 
Reaching to voids eternal and the haunt of deep chaos, 
A murky sea, isle-fretted lay. Thither he oared and 

there. 
Eased of his cargo, lay upon the shore. Demons there 

were 
Prodigious in bulk and black, scaled as the crocodile. 
Each huge as earth, and frowning each, that held a 

guardian place 
O'er lightnings storms and thunder-bolts. To them the 

souls passed in. 
With lightnings merged and passed from individuality. 



Thus to the cycle and the sphere creation tends, blending 
The whence and whither, as waters sprung from the 

ocean's womb 
Return to ocean. 

* * * Then Charon, a boatman on a cruise. 
More lone than comet doomed to roam the frontiers of 

old space, 
Oared back, a cowled, sad skipper on an ebless tide, and 

still 
He urged his ebon passage when from view of suns and 

worlds 
The stream of Styx was perished; on, in gloom, he, 

silent, swept. 



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